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The blood stretched on to the horizon, crimson and utterly still. Gale spun through air that felt heavy and thick, robe flaring as he turned, hoping to see something, anything. He was rewarded with nothing but views of the same flat, endless plane of blood and the same hazy, indistinct fog that passed for a sky in this place, whatever it was. The vast, empty perfection of the place unnerved him, and his unease compelled him to pick a direction and walk. The ripples of his passage were quickly snuffed, unable to survive and propagate in the place’s suffocating stillness. He knew, somehow, that this place was as inimical to him as it was to the signs of his presence – he was not wanted here, and did not belong.
He walked for days, or possibly for no time at all. He could not say how far he travelled, fighting through air as thick as molasses and a landscape that remained effortlessly, eternally the same. He saw nothing and no one.
Without any real thought he curled his fingers to summon a magical flame, instinctually seeking some bit of light and heat and life to accompany him in this desolate place. Nothing answered his call; the spell smothered in its crib with cold, slick fingers. Though nothing changed, he felt colder, even more unwelcome. He had tried to bring vitality to a place antagonistic to the concept, and in doing so drawn whatever wrath this place might manifest further down upon himself. There were no shadows here, lit as it was by a constant, unknowable source of light. But Gale felt hemmed in by hungry shadows all the same.
He kept walking. He did not know what else to do.
And in between one step and the next, just as surely as there had been nothing, there was something. Two figures equidistant, not far from him, both still.
One he knew, and one he did not.
The one known to him was Vesper, though dressed in a manner he had never before seen. They were dressed more richly than any king or queen in a long, trailing mantle of rich crimson that pooled around their feet and stretched behind them, somehow more evocative of blood than all the blood around it. They wore rings upon their fingers with great rubies and deep emeralds, hung tumbling falls of diamonds from their ears, and adorned their neck with black opals that somehow still kept their fire even in this darkling place. Only their head remained bare, pale white hair slicked back and nearly luminous against its dark surrounds.
Their eyes, though, were the same as the last time he had seen them – as cool and focused as a blade. He sensed that they were aware of his presence, though they offered him no acknowledgement. Perhaps they did not care to – their last conversation had hardly ended on the best of terms. Or perhaps they were sunken too deep into their predator’s nature to care, intent as they were upon that figure unknown. Now that he was aware of the circumstances of their birth, he found he could finally put that name – predator – to the tight-coiled intensity that lay behind the razor focus, the inescapable stare, the look they wore when writing spells and death both.
And what did it say of him, that he had found and still found such a thing to be beautiful? Certainly nothing that he wanted to hear.
The other figure he named less person and more emanation, for he could not tell where the plane ended and it began. While its upper half looked something like a man, its lower half was more a trunk than anything that might be called legs. The whole of its body was the same slick, wet, bloody red from the base of it to the eyeless skull that passed for its face.
Wrapped around the crown of that skull was the single piece of the emanation that departed from the material of the plane around it – a footlong strand of pulsing intestine wreathed in countless drops of blood, suspended in the air around it like tiny, ill-born stars. Its slow throbs promised ecstasy, the wild, uncivilized joy of the chase, the hunt, the kill, of cutting a bloody swathe to the top of the pack, leader by right of your savage skill. And strung all around it – some closer to the animal truth of it and some farther, but each a piece of its bloody halo – were the bold and the cornered and the sly, killers in the names of love and mercy and revenge.
This, he knew, was Vesper’s holy father.
After what had surely been an eternity of stillness, the emanation moved. Its arms rose with all the speed and weight of continents, their arcing as graceful as a murderous drunkard, until they came to rest at its chest. It curled its arched hands around one another and as they touched, they merged, flowing into one another and creating what he understood with horror to be something like a womb for the power of this place. It grew larger and more bloated with every second, drawing ever more blood up and through the emanation, and Gale swore he felt the current of it tugging at his boots, trying to drag him in and cannibalize him for power and parts.
Then the thing burst, throwing splatters of blood so high and wide it came back down as a fine red rain. The emanation seemed to slosh back into the figure and space it had occupied before, leaving the only evidence of its actions to be the thick line of blood splashed across one of Vesper’s eyes, as though their scar had opened up and bled again, and the new crown it now held in its hands – its own, writ small.
The emanation held out this new crown, made in the image of its own but not quite so grand in its grotesquerie, one hand on either side. Kneel, it said, though it had no lips to move.
For a moment he thought Vesper would refuse, remain still and suspended even in the face of this command. There was certainly no love within their heart for taking orders. But move they did at last, striding forward with all their usual grace, head held high. Their ripples did not die but instead spread, each one roiling out to the horizon and beyond. They walked, closing the distance between them and the emanation, until its outstretched hands and the crown rested just before their chest.
But they did not kneel. They looked the emanation in the eye instead, and placed one hand upon the proffered crown. Again the figures were still, still as death, still until all Vesper’s ripples ran out past the horizon and into the great beyond, and then everything around them was just as still as them, to the point where Gale feared to breathe and destroy the silence. For all that their fingers were clenched around it, they did not spare the crown a single glance. Their eyes were too distant to see it, fixed above and beyond.
Just as quickly as Vesper had stilled, they leapt back into motion. Using the hand wrapped around the crown as an anchor point, they seemed to spring forward – balancing upon their toes and sweeping the unoccupied hand up, up, past the second born crown to the first, the one perched upon the emanation’s own skull. With all the limber grace of the habitual spellcaster they drew their fingers through the crown’s gory asteroid field, slithering a hand around the elder crown and jerking it free before the emanation even seemed to realize that its gift had been rejected.
Quick as the wind, they flipped the stolen crown in their hand and set it upon their own head. The bloody thing left stains upon their brow and turned their white hair pink where it lay, but even as it marked them with its blood the thing was changing, shifting shape. Soon they wore not a terrible crown of intestine but a wreath of laurel leaves, golden and glorious. Without the crown, the emanation collapsed. It neither raged nor complained of either unfairness or treachery, but simply lost cohesion and slid, with nary a ripple, back into the blood that had birthed it.
Only Vesper remained, victory given form.
They held for a moment, then turned to him and began to approach. When the unflagging ripples of their passage swept his feet, he realized they made the blood of this place run fast and hot. Their acknowledgement startled Gale. As neither they nor the emanation had paid him any mind before, he had assumed himself to be some sort of half-there specter, some unnoticeable intrusion of reality upon this piece of the great beyond. But Vesper’s eyes did not leave his even once, and he knew he was caught. He could only wait and see what fate would be meted out to him by Vesper Crowned-in-Gold.
They looked every inch the conqueror, the triumphant general, mantled in ermine, bedecked in jewels, and crowned in gold so bright it shone like the sun. Even from this distance he could tell that they wore satisfaction, too, more lustrous than any of their jewels. While all of their raiment was exquisite, it was the crown – the crown! – that drew ever more of his gaze. From afar it was golden, gleaming. Up closer its radiance was dimmed, for every dip and divot, every detail on every golden leaf was smeared in dried and flaking gore. The blood of soldiers, of generals, of peasants and kings and cowards and children, of the brave and the braggadocious and the fearful and the mad, of those hungry and exhilarated and desperate and joyful, of any and every man who had wanted something so much that they would reach through the chest of another man to get it. Where the blood flaked there was gold and where the gold flaked there was blood – blood and gold and blood and gold until he could not tell which one lay at the core of the thing, which one was the base and beginning of the whole of it.
As soon as they moved they were before him, that clever and sanguine sovereign who held court upon the endless plane of blood. In their hands they held what he knew to be the same coronet that had once been offered to them, though now its looks reflected that of their own crown rather than those of their predecessor’s. Without a word they held it out to him, though he understood their meaning with a clarity that stretched beyond mere intuition. He touched his robes and felt the burning cold of the orb in his chest even through them. All he need do was kneel and all his problems would be solved. Kneel for the coronet, become a leal subject of this bloody place, and he no longer need fear the orb’s hungry embrace and the cold warping death that would follow. He would be free of pressure, of plots, of the desperate race to write himself a better end. All he would need to do was kneel at their mercy and all would be well. He should take it, this neatly packaged and easily consumed chance to live.
He did not want to take it. He did not want to sit second to a god again, to be kept in the posture of a supplicant at their feet. Not now, when a tantalizing new path had so recently opened for him, when he had finally come so close to finding a pen with which he might write himself that happy, no, exultant end. Not when they had refused this very same honor, discontent with scraps.
It was that last thought that sparked something inside him, set the gears turning in that brilliant brain of his. Vesper had refused. They had seen the crumbs on offer and ignored them, had held out for the whole Waterdhavian cheese wheel, as the saying went. Why shouldn’t he do the same? Why shouldn’t he try? It would be a gamble, yes, but a man with his talents could certainly throw the odds in his own favor.
He lifted his eyes from the crown to meet their gaze, and could have sworn he saw the barest hint of a smile there. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. When had they ever discouraged him from the path of genius?
“No,” he said in a voice swallowed by the vastness of the void before it could reach even his own ears. Luckily for him the void was of Vesper and Vesper was of the void, for they heard him still and smiled their terrible smile as the coronet fell to blood in their hands, staining their fingers red. Ruby droplets rolled down their fingers, thick and slow and glutinous, and hung suspended upon the tips for long, unhurried moments before slipping free. They caused no ripples and threw up no spray when they impacted the blood below. They hung suspended there, the two of them, as the blood pattered from their hands.
And then they were three.
He appeared between one breath and the next, unfolding from Vesper’s shadow as though it were a gateway, a doorway, an undeniable link between concepts inextricable, each always part and parcel of the other. Even after he had swaggered forth, made himself solid through some alchemy of audacity, their shadows remained connected at the head, bending and twisting into grotesque shapes to ensure that they should never be parted.
He was different, that man, in this unnamable place. But Gale knew him for who he was. Something about him screamed it, demanded that his name be known by all – that there be no other name on people’s lips but Enver Gortash.
He too was crowned as Vesper was crowned, though his was wrought of black iron, graven with eyes, and fashioned into points, sharp and wicked and deadly. Something of their shape reminded Gale of the sharp edges of a quill, of taking it in hand and scratching down the same information on page after page, of wading through a mountain of forms and addenda until the stack towered above him, until he came to realize that he had filled out the wrong form and would need to start it all again. It put him in mind of blank faces and bland denials, of rules that could not be bent, not for him. And the eyes, too – iron eyes on every street and in every home and every mind, watching, always watching, each one cool and dispassionate and focused, utterly, on even the smallest of transgressions. And in its thinnest peaks he saw the bars of cages, ones so delicately wrought they could be threaded through the human heart.
Gortash offered a hand to Vesper, palm up, and they rested a hand atop his. Neither closed their fingers upon the other, so they were not holding hands as such. Instead, their touch bound them, but did not restrain them. They suited one another well, crowned and dressed as they were in finery and horror.
For the first time in this plane of blood, Vesper spoke. Though their mouth moved, their voice did not rise from their throat. It came instead from everywhere and nowhere, bypassing his ears to whisper directly into the hollows of his bones, of his heart, of his skull. It was redolent with a cool confidence, a knowing that could be neither denied nor avoided. “You are not like the rest,” they said.
Gortash’s voice followed theirs – brasher, more presumptuous, with all the overfamiliarity of conspiratorial whisper. “You stand above the rabble with such an easy familiarity.”
“You have the vision,” they told him.
Gortash nodded his assent. “You have the power.”
“You might crown yourself as we have,” Vesper said, their voice promising tantalizing glimpses of terrific futures.
“You could be exalted,” Gortash flashed him a lascivious grin, “as we are.”
As one they offered him their unjoined hands. “We would have you join with us.”
Then they swept their hands down, still with that perfect synchronicity. Each move was perfectly mirrored, every gesture perfectly balanced, every breath and every thought reflected between the two of them, feeding the other then jumping back again to feed the first. This resonant harmony ensured their hands came to rest at just the same moment, fingers gesturing for him to look in just the same direction, down, down, to what they framed with perfect symmetry.
The Crown waited for him there, beneath the veil of blood. Karsus’s coronal vesture, somehow here. Somehow waiting for him. As if it had known.
“You have the skill.”
“You could bring it forth.”
Gale wanted it so badly he could taste it, all metal and ozone on the back of his tongue. But first he needed to understand how they had come here, what they were.
“This was your true plan all along,” he said, feeling out the shape of it as he spoke. “The plan within the plan. Everything else was shadow and smoke, misdirection from your true intent.” They said nothing in response, but it was easy to intuit their approval from a tilt of the head, a quirk of the brow. Something, however, nagged at him still. “He didn’t seem the sort, and so I must ask – was Ketheric party to this scheme of yours?”
Even as the last of the question left his mouth they were laughing, the three of them, and nothing more needed to be said on the matter. Standing here and now before these people, these gods, he knew without doubt that Ketheric Thorm, for all his grandiosity, was nothing but a man and harbored nothing more than a man’s petty dreams. Here, they were and are something more. Something better, something beyond.
“We did not know we could be three,” they said in harmony. They leaned in, inviting him to their collusion of breath; he came to share it eagerly. “We did not believe there might be another with the ambition and skill.”
The thought sent a thrill through Gale, even as his eyes were drawn inexorably back to the blood and its Crown. The blood was still and smooth as glass, the Crown’s image so immaculate he felt as though he might simply reach down and pluck it from the pool below, lift it free of its obscuring veils with ease. But some small part of him hesitated. It said he should not do this thing, that it was not right and it was not good, though its voice was weak and muffled, as though it had atrophied, or perhaps suffered more of the ravages of this killing place than the rest of him.
They watched him with a curiosity that had hints of the scalpel. “Don’t you want to try? To see if you can?”
He did. Gods help him, he did. And so he reached out a hand and extended his magical sense until he pinpointed the galvanic kick of the Crown in a shade of reality just below his own, and began to pull, wrenching it forth from the immaterial to the material, making it his. Making it real.
It was the fourth in the chorus of screams that rocked him from his trance. They had started as soon as he had begun his work, but he had ignored the first few, convinced (or, perhaps, simply hoping) that they were only some feature of the plane and no consequence of his weaving. But they swelled as his working swelled, the screams of fear and pain and desolation, and it was too much for him to countenance. He released his tremulous hold on the Crown more out of shocked reflex than conscious thought, and found himself returned to blessed silence.
His heart had abandoned his chest for his throat, and its rightful place overrun with knots. He looked up at the two before him, but that vision could not soothe him. He could guess, now, at the price they had paid for their kingdoms and crowns, for the name of god. At the price they wanted him, too, to pay for the same.
Understanding came for him with Vesper’s slow and sharp-toothed smile, implacable as the tide. He could no longer fail to know that he was looking at something inhuman, at two brilliant monsters and their implacable hungers for knowledge, for sport, for more. Even as he tried to disentangle them, to insist that whatever stood before him was not the person he had travelled with, known, loved, he had to admit that it wasn’t so. This was them, unveiled. The sharp teeth and inquisitorial eyes had always been there; until now they had simply been careful not to flash their carnivore’s teeth when they smiled.
He knew neither could give him a satisfactory answer, but he felt compelled to ask despite it. “How do you live with it?” He wasn’t sure if he was seeking knowledge or absolution.
The two watched him, shark-eyed. “There will always be death,” Vesper said.
“There will always be murder and tyranny,” continued Gortash.
Vesper shrugged. “How not? They are mortal inventions.”
“There will always be those who are crushed under the wheels of progress.”
“What are a few more, in the grand scheme of things?”
“Nothing, really.” Gortash waived a dismissive hand. “And why let nothing keep you just another mortal, scrabbling in the dirt? Don’t you want something greater? Something more?”
“Don’t you want to reach for it,” Vesper asked, “the glorious perfection of a piece of your mind made real, imposed upon the world through nothing but the caliber of your skill and the force of your desire?”
“Don’t you want to show them all what you can do? To prove to all those who said you overreached yourself just how wrong they were?”
Vesper leaned in, intent. “Don’t you want to push the boundaries of magic, of the world? To feel the thrill of it, the rendering of the impossible possible, even trivial?”
None of this he could deny. His fingers itched to try it, his mind already racing and leaping through every possibility and probability. There was, after all, always a price to progress. When it came down to it, the best wizards rarely had bloodless hands. And he did want it. Everything, all of it, down to the bone, so much that his limited, mortal body could hardly bear the weight of it. The body of a god could, of course. Just like it would bear the orb and spare him and any unfortunate bystanders both a grisly death. Here lay the solution to his little problem. And if it offered him something else, too – the chance of a lifetime, the ability to prove himself, power beyond measure – then he ought to be thankful for a much-needed bit of good fortune.
He took a breath and began again. He was careful, his casting methodical as he put delicate hole after delicate hole into the fabric of reality so that the Crown might be slipped through the gaps like water through a sieve. It was a brilliant plan, and audacious, and the cleverness of it kept him sheltered from the screams for half a heartbeat. But they would not be denied, those screams and cries and pleading voices, fear and rage and hunger and want, for nicer things and more coin and a higher position and more respect and more, more, more! The cries came filtering in with the Crown, and it drove knives into his heart to know that this new-made dissatisfaction and the rising tide of misery it heralded was because of him, and he couldn’t take it, but the thought of stopping and of giving it all up was just as unbearable, and he couldn’t stop but he couldn’t continue either, he couldn’t, and it was tearing him apart and –
He woke in his bed in the Elfsong Tavern, under Vesper’s watchful eyes.
“You were crying out in your sleep,” they told him.
He stared at them a moment, still scrabbling for his bearings, still half convinced the dream was real he would snap back to the plane of blood with his next blink. “And you didn’t wake me?”
The dream unnerved him still, and knowing that he’d been dreaming it under Vesper’s pointed gaze only rattled him further. He wasn’t sure what to make of the thing – whether to call it the product of an overstressed, overtired mind or something more. An omen, perhaps? Or possibly a vision from one of the gods themselves, warning him of what might come to pass. There were other powers, too, things more formless and primal than the gods that might transmit echoes of other worlds or near futures less as a warning than as pure reflex, the sheer power of such a momentous occasion sending ripples through the world like a stone thrown into a still pond. Perhaps there was no meaning to the dream. Perhaps it simply was, a thing that might have been or could be.
There was, of course, one other possibility. Many claimed dreams to be the provenance of gods and other such powers, but even a moderately skilled wizard was more than capable of dream-shaping. He knew Vesper to be more than capable, if such was their desire. Some would have dismissed the possibility outright – those of mean understanding. Vesper specialized in divination, the art of seeing, and the manipulation of dream-stuff lay firmly in the provenance of the illusionists. While the two were widely considered opposites, and indeed practitioners of one school were generally considered to be deficient in the other, he knew very well himself that such rules of thumb did not apply to the particularly talented. More than that, he was well studied in illusion magics and he found that when one reached the higher levels of the school, one came to understand that divination was not illusion’s opposite but rather its complement, as while one sought to see and one sought to be unseen, both were based within the paradigm of sight. All of which was to say that it was with great confidence he could say that Vesper’s specialty would by no means have been a hinderance to their goals, if they had set out to make him dream that dream. They could have done so with ease.
“Why didn’t you wake me,” he asked again, this time both to them and to himself, “if I was crying out?”
“You are so afraid of pain,” they said. Their voice was cold, their gaze flat. “You run from it without a thought. You must learn to pass through it to find what awaits you on the other side.”
What did they mean by that? Were they referring to the events of the dream? The memory of it was curdling inside him, mortaring his organs with guilt and shame and, though he did not wish to admit it, loss. The questions burned on the tip of his tongue but he did not want to ask them; he did not want to admit to his dream if he did not have to, not when he had acted what most would consider the villain.
“You’re angry with me,” he said, in lieu of any of his speculation. In all the drama of his waking he’d forgotten that the two of them had barely spoken since the evening of the coronation, four days previous. Vesper had heard Gortash’s summary of their past life not with shock but with steady calm, as though it had merely confirmed for them something that they had already suspected. He had been furious at the reveal, furious that they had been the architect of all this misery, furious that they had seemed to have surmised that some time ago, furious that his lover was some sort of blood-drenched mastermind and that at first he had forgotten to be repulsed, seeing as he was too busy being impressed by the sheer audacity of their scheming. He’d stewed in it all day as they’d tramped from one end of the city to another on errand after errand, and that evening his temper had boiled over. He’d laid all the blame for their current situation right at their feet, perhaps a touch unfairly. But only a touch. He supposed he ought to have suspected that they might be furious in turn.
“It makes me no less correct,” they responded.
Ah. Definitely furious with him, then. “You did this,” he said, angry that they were angry. The monsters in the streets and the monsters in the keeps and the monsters in their heads had all been manufactured at their hands. They were the reason he was sitting here, life and mind dependent on a desperate plan and the promises of a man he wouldn’t even trust to watch his coinpurse. “All of this.” He flung an arm out to indicate the entire miserable state of the world.
They watched him, steady and calm. His accusations did not appear to disturb them, though they excelled at keeping their mask even. Their lips pulled up at one corner as they spoke. “I’d long thought myself to be one of the precious few people capable of world-shaking.” They flashed him just enough teeth that it could pass for a smile. “How pleasant to have you confirm it and stroke my ego so.”
Gale ground his teeth. Even here, even now they would not take responsibility for all they had wrought. “You think this is funny,” he accused.
All pretenses at humor on their part fled. “Did you expect me to beg for your forgiveness?” they asked silkily. “Prostrate myself before you?”
He spluttered, shocked by the turn the conversation had taken. Had he? He was well aware that such was not within their nature. Though perhaps that was not –?
“Shall I apologize as well for eruption of Mount Hotenow and the destruction it caused?” they continued relentlessly. “Why not the fall of Elturel and the destruction of Netheril as well? After all, world-shaker without memories that I am we of course must assume that I have had a hand in all of those events as well.”
That only served to stoke the heat behind his eyes. “Do you even regret it?” he hissed, his voice echoing louder in his ears than he had intended.
A smile uncoiled on Vesper’s face, this time one with too many teeth. They reminded him of nothing so much as the tressym that had got the cream. “Do you regret your choices, Gale?”
“Of course,” he answered automatically. What were they playing at?
They continued on, ignoring his answer. “Or do you regret what it cost you, the loss of your life and your magic? Do you regret the trying,” they said, and as they spoke they traced their fingers in obvious, exaggerated arcs along the cover of the book they held in their lap, which he now realized to be the Annals of Karsus, “or do you regret the failing and the consequences it wrought?”
Of course I regret it, he wanted to say, but he choked on the words. Their smirk said it all. He wanted to protest that it wasn’t the same, that they were twisting his intentions, but the words sounded weak even within the confines of his own mind. How could he argue when they were toying with the physical proof of his continued ambition? His jaw worked futilely, trying to force out words he could not bring himself to say.
As his silence stretched on, they stopped smiling. “We live with our consequences, you and I,” they eventually said softly, gesturing first at their head and then at his chest. “And I, for one, would say that is worth more than any pathetic whimpering about what we might have done.”
He shouldn’t agree, he thought. Something gnawed at him, something missing from their formula, something that made it not right, not true. But no refutation of their stance made itself known to him, and he felt as though he had perhaps lost the right to argue this point when many would say that he had done nothing but push to take his own mistakes further.
Unwilling to continue on this subject, at least not when his mind was blurry from sleep and shame, he fumbled around for another topic. “Did I wake you?” he asked.
“No,” they said, in a tone that told him they were very aware of what he was doing and had chosen to allow it. “I had not yet gone to sleep.”
“You need your rest just as much as the rest of us,” he said. It came out more awkward than gallant, in the end. “Maybe more,” he continued, aware he was rambling now, “if you’re to wield the netherstones alongside Gortash.”
He paused a moment, then plunged on, at last giving voice to some of the things that had eaten at him since that fateful coronation day. “I know your reasons for the alliance,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers. “It does us no favors to set the city’s leader against us, and we need someone familiar with the brain besides, especially one who has practiced subduing it with the stones. But is that all?” Will you betray us? he wanted to ask, and master the brain for your own ends? Your old ends, even? And what are you two to one another anyway?
They laced their fingers together. “Can you find any flaw with the reasons I have given?”
He blinked. He had not expected that. “Well… no,” he said cautiously.
“And yet you ask all the same,” they replied. “Very well. Allow me to elaborate. With three stones, we must have three wielders. Three people practiced in focusing their minds, in taming wild forces, in mastering the intangible. You know as well as I that individuals capable of such work at the level this situation will require are hardly common – many a city would count itself lucky to contain one at all. And yet we must have three. I have cowed the brain once already, so I am clearly capable. And you, Gale, are a highly talented wizard and most certainly capable. But we will need a third. And who here could complete our triumvirate?”
They unlaced their fingers and reached out a hand to him, and for a moment, just a moment, he could have sworn they were laurel-crowned. “We must have Gortash. He has demonstrated already some ability to subdue the brain, and you are as well aware as I that there are no others in the city who might even approach our abilities. It could only ever be us three.”
This declaration did not surprise him – he had come to more or less the same conclusion, once the hottest fires of his anger had burned themselves out. Lorroakan might have once been a possibility, but he was dead at the Dame Aylin’s hands. Vesper could do it, and he himself was certainly more than capable, but they were correct in their assertion that no others in the city or among their companions could match their talent and training. Young Rolan might serve, but only after another decade of study, and with Mystra’s charge to him he knew Elminster would not consent to intervene. They truly had no alternatives. As little as he liked to admit it, they would need Gortash for this.
But that had answered neither his spoken question nor his unspoken ones. “It is as you say,” he said, diplomatically, “and I have never disputed your assertions. But that was not my question.”
They tilted their head, considering. “The effect of the binding upon the brain will be born of the combined pressure of the wielders’ intents,” they began, slowly. “And you will, of course, seek to see the brain defanged rather than brought under our control. As you are aware, the three of us must act in perfect consort, lest any disharmony allow the brain to slip our net. And for a working so great and dangerous as this we must know one another utterly, be united in body, in mind, and in spirit. We must act with one mind. You will know our thoughts, and we will know yours in turn – our intentions, within the working at least, will be as clear to one another as glass. We could not chain the brain at our feet without your say-so.” They offered him a crooked smile, one in which he could see no teeth. But he knew they lurked beneath the surface, sharp as knives, sharp as their awful, brilliant mind. “Does that settle your fears?”
It did and did not. Workings and rituals of a certain strength did require such an accord. It was a thing of great intimacy, and not lightly done. Lovers of decades might not even have shared such confidences. That they would even propose such a thing as necessary meant that they believed the situation to be quite dire. “Do you even think we’re capable?” he asked. “We’re all different enough that I think we’ll struggle to create the necessary harmony, let alone sustain it.”
“It will be easy for the symmetry to exist between us.” They spoke with an unshakable confidence, as though stating a fact rather than constructing an argument. “You will understand this, I think, when the time comes. We three are more alike than you realize, and we want so many of the same things. We will join our intents easily.”
Then they leaned in, eyes focused unblinkingly on his. Their gaze held an intensity he had not seen before, not in this world, but that he recognized from his blood-soaked dream. They smiled a little, a sly smile, a conspirator’s grin just barely this side of salacious. “We will be great together, us three.”
The moon broke through the clouds to mantle them in moonlight. And as that silvery light poured over them, he saw in this Vesper echoes of what he had seen in the dream – hints of the inhumanity, the monster, of they-who-would-be-king.
Would you be a god? he wanted to ask. Would you slip this mortal coil and carve yourself a brilliant, bloody path to the heavens if you only had the power? He looked at the book that still resided on their lap. His fingers itched at the thought of it, of the secrets it might contain, of the revolutions they could become. How might the world bend for you unchained, brilliant and glorious and terrible in all your power? If you had my chance, would you take it? Will I?
They looked to the moon and made no answer.
He didn’t need them to.
Their answer, at least, he knew.